"Bah!" said Nicholas, in his turn. "One is not wrong to laugh at the scaffold; it is like the prison and the galleys; we laugh at them also; so long as we are all friends together, 'A short life and a merry one!'" "For instance," said the prisoner with the lisping voice, "what would be tough would be to keep us in cells day and night." "In cells!" cried Skeleton, with a kind of savage alarm. "Do not speak of it. In cells! All alone! I would rather they would cut off my arms and legs. All alone! Between four walls! All alone! No old mates to laugh with! That cannot be! I prefer a hundred times the galleys to the prisons, because at the galleys, instead of being shut up, one is out of doors, sees company, moves about. Well! I would rather a hundred times be a head shorter than be put into a cell only for one year. See here, at this moment, I am sure of being cut down, am I not? Well, let them say to me, 'Would you prefer a year in a cell?' I would stretch out my neck. A year all alone! Can this be possible? What would they have one think of when one is all alone?" "If they were to put you there by force?" "I would not remain. I would make such use of my feet and hands that I would escape," said Skeleton. "But if you could not--if you were sure that you could not escape?" "Then I would kill the first one I could, in order to be guillotined." "But if, instead of condemning the red-handed to death, they condemned them to a solitary cell for life?" Skeleton seemed to be staggered by this reflection. After amoment's pause he replied: "Then I do not know what I should do. I would break my head against the walls. I would allow myself to die with hunger rather than be in a cell. How? All alone--all my life alone with myself? without the hope of escape? I tell you it is not possible. You know there is no one bolder than I am. I would bleed a man for a crown, and even for nothing, for honor. They think that I have only assassinated two persons; but if the dead could speak, there are five who could tell how I work." The brigand boasted of his crimes. These sanguinary egotisms are among the most characteristic traits of hardened criminals. A prison governor told us,"If the pretended murders of which these wretches boast were real, population would be decimated." "So I say," replied Barbillon, boasting in his turn; "they think that I only laid out the milkwoman's husband in the city; but I have served many others out, with Big Robert, who was shortened last year." "It was only to tell you," said Skeleton, "that I neither fear fire nor the devil. But, if I were in a cell, and very sure of not being able to escape--thunder! I believe I should be afraid." "Of what?" asked Nicholas. "Of being all alone," answered the cock of the walk. "So, if you had to recommence your robberies and murders, and, instead of prisons and galleys and guillotine, there were only cells, you would hesitate?" "Yes--perhaps" (_a fact_), answered the Skeleton.